“Meeting people where they are” is Wen’s entire COVID proposal; the middlegame and the endgame. By “people,” she means groups who actively or passively oppose public health measures, and by “meet where they are,” she means “stay where they are, possibly permanently”
https://twitter.com/luckytran/status/1535351192301326338
Efforts by Wen and others like her to invoke a public that is “tired” and sees masks or testing (or really any measure) as “burdensome” are an ideological manipulation that invokes “the public” for the benefit of elites 
Even a social scientist—especially a social scientist—couldn’t say with confidence that “people” are “tired.” Any sweeping claim about the public is going to be, in a way, propaganda. (But nevertheless true that a majority of Americans have continued to support masking)
As such, it would have made great public health sense to develop messaging to build the sense that “people” are resilient, that we care about each other, and that we indeed collectively see masking as both necessary and convenient—not unacceptable or “tiring,” etc
Anyway, Wen’s “public” is, at best, cherry-picked—and instead of attempting to change the alleged views of this putative demographic, Wen argues for reifying them, ginning them up, and making policy around them. This kind of self-defeating platform does its own ideological work
By creating of a virtue of futility, Wen is also creating a platform for a bad-faith public health—a dangerous, politically compromised “public health lite”—that presumes an uncooperative, fatalistic, essentially antisocial individual as its subject
I can’t easily think of a historic precedent—where medical professionals openly endorsed a mediocre-to-catastrophic national public health outcome out of a felt sense that people could not be, or do, or be asked to do any better—and instead worked to lower public expectations
There is a curious biopolitical dimension to this issue insofar as it pivots on the construction of affect as a foundation of public health behavior. In a sense, Wen and co. could be seen as corroding that affective resource by pandering (“meet people where they are,” e.g.)
I also really wonder about the bigger consequences of pandemic policies that are openly described as responding to presumed bad faith and “bad subjects.” Legibly, they contain a punitive element, and an element of almost righteous abandonment
Last, well maybe not very last, thought—again, it’s curious to see that these allegedly humanitarian efforts to cater to the putatively tired, burdened public are *in no way* intended as precedent for concessions around labor, gun control, climate, infant formula, student loans…
And so it ends up seeming like the (partly imaginary and at least overhyped) figure of defeated, exhausted public are actually being used as shock troops or cover for policies simply offering less government, less health, and less help
As many have pointed out—hard to think of equiv cases of abandonment of professional obligations, prerogatives owing to the supposed fatigue or apathy or disinterest of the public. The “public” is uninterested in tons of things that we get no relief from, for better and worse
In sum, these interpellations of a “tired” public are prob best understood as a stalking horse for a very pessimistic vision of government (and society tout court)—and they’ll also likely prove self-fulfilling, precisely bc of the tepid public health response they authorize
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